Friday, May 5, 2017: Day Fourteen

Before you get too excited about me being in the Southwest for Cinco de Mayo, let me go ahead and disappoint you. We were on the road until 11pm and now we’re exhausted. We did grab a Mexican dinner in Albuquerque at a restaurant called Frontier, where I chowed down on an enchilada and Nathan enjoyed nachos. More importantly, we left with a frontier sweet roll for the road, which we both discovered is basically a fresh, warm, extra large honeybun. Alas, not a single margarita was had. We’ll probably need to make up for that on Seis de Mayo while we’re in Santa Fe.

We left Phoenix around 10am after grabbing a bagel from Einstein Bros. Knowing our trip to Santa Fe was going to be a long one, we planned a few stops along the way.

We started by taking a bit of a detour. Nathan plugged in his phone and queued the soundtrack for this excursion, “Take It Easy” by the Eagles. I’m sure you’ve guessed it because below is a picture of me “…Standing on the corner of Winslow, Arizona…” Sure enough, there was a girl and a flatbed Ford. Winslow may not have much, but it definitely has this street corner.

Not too much further down I-40 (Route 66), we entered the Petrified Forest. Since we bought an annual pass to the National Parks for this trip, we decided to add another park to our list. We were in a bit of a hurry, but we made a couple of stops within the park to check out the fossilized wood, some petroglyphs, and see the original Route 66.

Stopped by the original Route 66

After a quick trip through the Petrified Forest, we made our way to Albuquerque. This took us longer than anticipated after we hit a long stretch of traffic that set us about an hour behind our intended schedule. This was the first real block of traffic we’ve hit on this trip.

We arrived in Albuquerque for dinner around 10pm and finally made it to Santa Fe by 11pm. We have yet to actually see much of New Mexico in daylight, however, I did see a man wearing a Heisenberg-style hat minutes after crossing the New Mexico state line, and moments later saw a very familiar looking RV that made Nathan and I both raise our eyebrows. Friends, I do believe some folks are still breaking bad around here.